


Your Body is a Wonderland

by gilligankane



Category: Pitch Perfect (2012)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 22:43:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gilligankane/pseuds/gilligankane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tattoos always have a history behind them. And you’d expect tattoos on a girl like Beca. But Chloe is full of surprises and it turns out that the ladybug on her wrist isn’t a drunken mistake or a whimsical fantasy. Nor it is her only one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Body is a Wonderland

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by Kay, as per usual. Beta'd by Nice-Jess.

Beca got her first tattoo to teach her parents a lesson.

It wasn’t a cry for help, really. It was more of a “If you’re just going to keep arguing and yelling every time I ask a question, then I’ll just do what I want” type of cry. So she saved up a couple hundred dollars from making mix CDs for kids at her high school, forged her mother’s signature on a few pieces of paper, and came home with a freshly inked shoulder and a large tube of A+D ointment, free of charge.

Her mother, Rose Soon-To-Not-Be Mitchell, wasn’t impressed with her choice of flowers or the way, at first glance, the vines and thorns seem to be suffocating the rosebud. Her father just gave a weary sigh, one she grew used to over the next few years.

She had to resist itching at it as it healed, because she did her research. She might have impulsively gotten one, but the computer is a magical tool and one “infected tattoo” Google Image search convinced her to take a few minutes and research what could go wrong and how to prevent it. It itched something bad, though, like the year she had the chicken pox. But night after night, she just slathered on another layer of A+D and slept on her other side.

She had to admit, it looked pretty awesome.

It fits her, too. She bought a three-pack of dark tanktops and she stood in the mirror, awed and impressed at how the rose seemed to explode from out of the cotton material, winding around the shoulder blade. Beca felt badass. She felt like now she was someone, a girl with a tattoo and a handful of ear piercings. Her mother hated it, though, and so the next time Beca came into a bit of money, she went out and pierced her cartilage.

That’s when she realized how she likes a tattoo needle a hell of a lot more than an ear-piercing needle.

(She’s always hated needles. She even used to have her dad come to her doctor appointments so she could hold his hand when they pricked her finger to do a quick iron test. About the time her parents start fighting, though, Beca decides she can go to the doctor’s alone, ignoring the defeat on her father’s face.

After feeling guilty about it, she just decides to stop finding reasons to be alone with either of them.)

So every time she comes into some money – birthdays, Christmas, making CDs, the dog-walking gig she has every so often – she puts it into a little mason jar on desk, crudely deemed her ‘tattoo fund’ and doodles new designs while her CDs burn.

*

Her second tattoo comes a couple years later. Her skin aches to be inked and she gives Ethan, who did her first tattoo, her design eagerly. She’s waited six more months to do this one, putting herself to a test: if she found one she liked and she still was crazy about it six months later, she would get it.

Six months to the day she first picked it out, she’s got her arm draped over a table and she’s trying hard not to tap her foot to the gentle hum of the needle.

Ethan pauses with the tip of the needle just above her skin. “A grasshopper. Are you sure?”

Beca nods, smirking. “Of course I am. Just do it or I’m not tipping you as much.”

Ethan shrugs and gets to work, doing the outline first and setting up his colors.

A grasshopper seems like a strange choice and people might think she’s weird, getting a bug inked permanently onto her body, but it has meaning behind it and they can deal.

(Nine months ago, she got a job working at a small music store where they sell nothing but used CDs and her boss, Rex, a guy with a hulking profile and a strange love of the “Karate Kid” movies took her under his bicep-bulging wing. He let her roam through the stacks, burning CDs onto her computer before she sold them off.

His favorite thing to say was, “Patience, young grasshopper,” and he laughed this big, deep laugh, every time.

Three months later, the shop was closed and Rex’s widow gave her most of the CDs they had in inventory before she moved back to Minnesota to be closer to her parents.)

When it’s done, all bright green and looking like it’s ready to pounce from her wrist to the palm of her hand, she tells Ethan she’ll remember him when she’s famous and living in LA, so many tattoo artists at her disposal.

Four months after that, though, she’s getting out of a cab at Barden University, and she’s pretty much just about ready to scream.

*

Beca isn’t sure what to think of Chloe. Chloe is a kaleidoscope of different images and shapes and colors, like every time Beca turns around Chloe just seems different in some small, but important way.

The first time they meet, Chloe smiles brightly and her hair shines brighter and she makes Beca think of stupidly adorable things, like puppies rolling around in sunshine. She seems so bubbly and upbeat and genuinely happy and Beca never knows what do with people who actually enjoy things like being alive.

(But Chloe has a darker side, one with less puppies and more tears. It’s not that her smile is a front, at all, but Beca just comes to learn that sometimes, when Chloe just can’t handle Aubrey’s stress and her own hopes all at once, it can be a mask for a minute or two.)

It makes Beca uncomfortable because she can’t push that feeling of contagiousness Chloe gives off down as easily as she wants to, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

The first time they meet, the second thing that Beca notices is that Chloe has a tattoo. A tiny little ladybug under the nest of veins on her wrist. And Beca immediately dismisses it.

It’s a  _ladybug_ , for God’s sake.

Girls with smiles like Chloe’s get tattoos like ladybugs, or butterflies, or stupid quotes in looping fonts that no one can actually read. Girls with smiles like Chloe’s get tattoos in places like Ft. Lauderdale or Mexico or Key West, after their third piña colada or virgin daiquiri.

So Beca immediately dismisses that and the idea of joining an a capella group at the same time. There’s no way she’s joining a group of estrogen charged girls just to “make music with their mouths.” It honestly sounds like a tagline of a badly funded porno, and if she wanted to be a sideshow at a freak carnival, she would have insisted her parents stay together a long time ago.

And she thought that would be the end of it.

Chloe, though, didn’t.

“You can sing!”

Beca should have known: girls with smiles like Chloe’s don’t have any understanding of personal boundaries. They just do anything they want, like barge into Beca’s shower stall, as equally naked, and demand a song Beca wasn’t sure girls like them would know.

Chloe is and will always continue to be never what Beca expects, though.

Sure, they’re naked. And sure, this shower stall seems to be getting better by the minute, but the look of genuine interest in Chloe’s eyes…

(Because oh, God, Beca refuses to look anywhere but there or think about anything but her eyes, she really does. She won’t look or think about the very beautiful, very naked girl standing so close and it’s already too late.)

The look of interest in Chloe’s eyes has Beca opening her mouth and hesitantly singing David Guetta’s genius arrangement. Beca feels her face stretching into a smile, lagging half a second behind the one Chloe is sporting. They actually do sound really good together and if this is how they make music, then the Bellas might be onto something.

“You have to come to auditions,” Chloe says. Beca starts to shake her head no but Chloe inches closer and Beca loses her train of thought. She foolishly looks down and her eyes catch that ladybug again, so dangerously close to Chloe’s – naked – hip where her hands are perched. The “no” she was going to say comes out as a choked noise and Chloe takes it as a yes.

Beca almost calls her back and retracts her not-so-much-of-a-yes, but when Chloe turns around and saunters, still very naked, out of Beca’s shower stall, Beca sees another splash of color wrapped around the back of Chloe’s hip bone.

For just a second, she forgets why she’s even standing in the bathroom.

*

A few weeks into this Bellas thing, which is something she actually enjoys, when Aubrey isn’t being a battalion commander, she’s walking with Chloe, since they both have a class in the same building in ten minutes, and she brings up the tattoo thing. She brushes her fingers against the grasshopper on her own wrist for courage before she opens her mouth. “So, you have a ladybug tattoo.”

Chloe grins widely and sticks her arm out, pushing the sleeve of her sweater back. “I do. Isn’t it cute?”

See, Beca knew. Girls with smiles like Chloe’s think that tattoos are cute. But Beca actually kind of agrees with Chloe, a little. It’s a cute ladybug. She’s just not sure there’s such a thing as an ugly ladybug.

“And you have a grasshopper, right?” Chloe, boundaryless Chloe, reaches for Beca’s arm, pulling it up and looking at it closely. “Oh, this is cute too.”

Beca snatches her arm back. “It’s not cute,” she says defensively.

There  _are_  cute things in life. There are puppies and Chloe and kittens and little kids before they open their mouths and scream like the spawns of Satan and stuff like ladybugs.

But Beca’s grasshopper tattoo is  _not_  cute. It’s badass. It’s hardcore. She didn’t even flinch when she got it.

Chloe looks amused. “No, of course not. I meant it’s awesome. I like it.”

Beca nods, still a little wounded. “I like yours too,” she offers.

Chloe lights up again, reaching her inked-arm across her body to press her forearm against Beca, so the two tattoos are side by side. “They are definitely cool.”

“Why’d you get a ladybug?”

Chloe hesitates. It’s a small one, but Beca, looking too closely, paying too close attention, notices it. And instead of speaking, Chloe considers her for a second before she finally says, “Why do you have a grasshopper?”

Beca shrugs. That’s a story she doesn’t like to tell, not to Ethan and not to her father and not to Chloe, not yet. “Liked it.”

“Me too,” Chloe says quickly, her smile flickering like a glitch in a television program before it’s back on. “We have a thing, you know.”

Beca’s heart starts to pound in her ears like a heavy bass line. “We do?” she asks, hoping her voice doesn’t crack.

“Yeah. A ‘tattoos-of-bugs’ thing. We’re connected now.”

Beca breathes a little easier, but the weight on her chest doesn’t dissipate. “Right, that. Yeah, we do. Pretty cool,” she adds lamely.

“Super cool,” Chloe corrects, throwing her arm around Beca’s neck. It sends Beca careening into Chloe’s side and she panics, stretching back to apologize before she remembers that Chloe pulled her closer in the first place. So she tries to breathe normally and stays against Chloe’s side while the redhead rants about something until they get to the doors of the Bowman Hall.

Chloe’s fingers drag across the grasshopper as she says goodbye and it takes Beca a whole ten seconds to remember to turn and walk to class.

*

Beca almost forgets about the other tattoo Chloe has. Almost, until after rehearsal one night, when Chloe found out that Beca has never seen the movie “Andre” which is “one of my favorites,” Chloe claims. “And I’m kind of personally offended on behalf of the movie.” So Chloe invites herself over, her arms laden with ‘Essential Childhood Movies’ and a hundred boxes of Mike&Ike candies, and throws herself onto Beca’s hybrid sofa-bed.

Beca stands back and looks at Chloe there and hates how unfairly gorgeous Chloe looks like that, all limbs-and-hair-splayed out naturally. Beca doesn’t look like that when she slumps onto the place she calls home. She knows because Kimmy Jin took a picture for her and pointed out all the ways she looked like a dead body, then hung the picture, adorned with Sharpied-in notes, on the front of their door, in case she forgot. Chloe, though, looks graceful and elegant and when she crooks her finger at Beca, Beca can’t say no. She falls back into the cushion with Chloe and settles in for a movie she’s sure she’s going to hate.

It’s halfway through the thing – she  _is_  digging the younger Joshua Jackson part of the movie – and Beca is pretty proud of herself for not drooling all over Chloe. That is, until Chloe reaches for a Mike&Ike that fell to the ground and the sweatshirt she’s wearing rides up as she leans forward, exposing a sliver of alabaster skin dotted with colored ink.

The tattoo.

Beca reaches for it without even thinking, tracing the line of the flower. She feels Chloe go still under her fingers but then the redhead sits up slowly, the tattoo disappearing again. “So,” she says slowly. “You found another one.”

“Another one?” Beca asks, her eyes going wide. “Does that mean you have more than two?”

Chloe shrugs, hiding a smile so Beca switches tactics.

“So what is it?” Maybe she shouldn’t have asked, because Chloe pulls up her sweatshirt and twists around so that Beca can see it again. It’s a whole lot of skin and a flower that looks to be about six inches tall, disappearing under the waistband of Chloe’s pants. Beca tries even harder to keep breathing. “It’s a larkspur,” Chloe explains. When Beca doesn’t say anything, Chloe adds, “It means open heart. Because my mom says I have one.”

Beca used to think it was little ridiculous, getting tattoos of flowers because of their “meaning” and she understands that yes, she has one, but that’s different. Now, though, it’s the greatest idea she’s ever heard. She hears Chloe laugh.

“Go ahead. I can tell you want to.”

Beca thinks about denying it but her body has other ideas and her hand is already reaching forward, pressing against the lines of the ink again more firmly, feeling the raised dots under the tips of her fingers. She traces down as far as it can before looping back up the other side of the purple flower.

“It’s, uh,” Beca clears her throat, feeling awkward even in her own skin. “It’s really nice.”

She looks up and Chloe is staring at at her, working her bottom lip between her teeth, her eyes so wide and so blue. Beca feels her breath catch and her mouth drops open a little, the skin on the back of her neck flushing.

“You think so?” Chloe asks, her voice dropping down to a whisper.

Beca nods, her movements jerky and unlike her. She can feel Chloe’s breath against her neck and her palms feel sweaty and she knows Chloe can tell because her hand slips off Chloe’s larkspur tattoo and rests awkwardly on the waistline of the sweats Chloe is wearing. She swallows dryly and wills her body to move in, just a little closer.

“Yeah,” Beca breathes out.

(The last time she was here, about to kiss someone for the first time, Rex practically broke down the break room door at the record shop and ruined everything and God, if Kimmy Jin comes back to the room right now, Beca will never forgive her for it.)

Chloe is the one who takes a chance, though, and Beca thinks it’s only fair, because Beca is already doing as much as she can, which is breathing and not passing out at the same time. And then Beca is only trying not to pass out because Chloe is kissing her, on her stupid sofa-couch, in her stupid dorm room with a movie about a stupid seal playing on her laptop. Her hand curves around the curve of Chloe’s hip, her fingertips brushing against the edge of her tattoo, while her other hand goes to the back of Chloe’s neck, pulling her closer.

She can’t tell you anything else about that movie, but she does know that Chloe wears pomegranate lipgloss.

*

They’re lying in Beca’s bed, her new favorite place in the world, while Beca pretends to study for her philosophy 101 class. Instead of asking herself the “big questions,” she’s more focused on whether or not Chloe is wearing a shirt under that sweater she has on. She turns a page she hasn’t read over in her notebook while her other hand drops to Chloe’s jean-clad shin. She traces illegible patterns and may even slip in her name once or twice while Chloe, supposedly focused on her music theory practice test, smirks over the top of her notebook. She slides her hand back, up towards Chloe’s ankle and foot so she can slip her hand under Chloe’s pant leg.

She’s skimming her fingers along the bone of Chloe’s ankle when she frowns a little and it certainly isn’t because she has no idea what the hell she’s even supposed to be studying right now.

“What is this?”

Beca doesn’t wait for Chloe’s answer, pushing her pant leg back and pulling down her orange-and-pink sock down a little.

Well, she found another one of Chloe’s tattoos. That makes the ladybug Chloe doesn’t really talk about, the larkspur, and this new one, which looks like a few musical notes.

“It’s a tattoo.”

Beca sighs, feigning exasperation. “Well, yes. Of what?”

Chloe leans forward, squinting her eyes a bit. “That one is the chorus to “Let it Be.” By the Beatles.”

“Yeah, I know who it’s by,” Beca says dismissively. She reaches for Chloe’s other foot, crossed under the first one. Untangling her legs, she pushes the other pant leg back and pulls down the sock until she can see the inside of Chloe’s ankle, finding another bundle of musical notes. “What’s this one?”

Chloe closes her notebook. “They’re my dad’s favorites. That one is “Free Bird.” By-”

“By Lynyrd Skynyrd, I know.” Beca sits back, a smirk growing on her face. “You were totally going to join the High Notes, weren’t you?”

Chloe’s only answer is to throw her notebook half-heartedly at Beca. Beca laughs and tosses it off her bed to the floor, adding her own notebook to the pile as she climbs across her sofa-bed, hovering over Chloe with an impish grin.

“You were,” she says. Chloe just smiles up at her, her hands reaching to rest on Beca’s hips. “You were going to join the High Notes, you hippie. And Aubrey talked you out of it, I bet.”

Chloe kisses her sweetly, tipping her head back as Beca leans further over her, her feet hooking around Chloe’s ankles.

A ladybug, a larkspur, and two musical note tattoos.

That’s got to be all of them.

*

That’s not all of them, Beca finds out. She’s not sure how she keeps missing all these permanent marks on Chloe’s body. It’s not like they’re little things, not in the measure of tattoos. They’re decent sizes but she’s still so surprised when she finds the one on Chloe’s left shoulder blade, just about where Beca’s roses start.

Beca sits back on her heels, her knees bracketing Chloe’s hips, her arms and chest bare and goosebumps starting to show. “Do you just go get new tattoos all the time and I’m completely oblivious?”

Chloe laughs and tugs Beca back down until Beca is lying next to her. Beca’s arms go around Chloe’s middle, brushing past the larkspur and settling against the small of her back, her bare skin cooling quickly under Beca’s palm. “No, silly. If I go get another one, I’d ask if you wanted to come.”

Beca peers over Chloe’s shoulder, looking at the tattoo. “Is that really what I think it is?”

She looks back at Chloe just in time to see Chloe’s hurt frown before it’s replaced by a blank stare. Beca instantly takes it back. “No, I mean, it’s awesome.”

Chloe shrugs, dislodging Beca’s embrace. “It’s fine. Not everyone has to like it.”

“No, I do. And I’m not just saying that because you’re half-naked,” Beca rushes to add. “I swear.”

“It’s really okay, Beca.”

Beca shakes her head. “No, I’m serious. ‘Peter Pan’ is one of my favorite movies. Technically, ‘Hook’ is one of my favorite movies, but it’s along the same theme, right?”

Chloe rolls her eyes but starts to smile again. “My brother has the same one, but it’s a cuff on his leg. If you think I’ve got a lot, you should see him.”

Inside, Beca is freaking out. Chloe keeps making small comments like that. Meet my family. Meet my brother. Inside, Beca is just waiting for the awkward “come by for insert Holiday here dinner” conversation that feels inevitable that will only be awkward because she knows she’ll say yes too fast. But she smiles anyway and makes a noise that doesn’t sound too much like she’s committing to the idea and shifts until she’s comfortable against Chloe again.

Chloe hums contentedly and they lie in silence for a few moments, Beca’s fingers running along the lines of Chloe’s newly discovered tattoo.

“Do you really like it?”

Beca lifts her head and then looks over Chloe’s shoulder again: it’s Peter and Wendy and Michael and John and that little teddy bear Michael carries everywhere in the movie in mid-flight and just the hint of the second star to the right dipping down the slope of Chloe’s shoulder blade.

When she opens her mouth, the truth comes out. “Yeah, I really do.”

Chloe grins widely and nods to herself and Beca just adds it to the list of things about Chloe that should stop surprising her, but don’t.

*

Beca likes when they hold hands. She likes it because Chloe has nice hands, the kind that people should hold any chance they get. She likes it because when she holds Chloe’s hand, the grasshopper on her wrist lines up with the ladybug on Chloe’s and there’s something about it that makes Beca feel warm on the inside. 

As they’re crossing campus, she can’t help but ask again. “What does the ladybug mean?” Chloe tilts her head in Beca’s direction. “You got the larkspur for your mom and the Peter Pan thing for your brother and the music notes for your dad, so… What about the ladybug?”

Chloe shrugs. “What’s with the grasshopper?” 

Beca’s free hand immediately goes to her tattoo, covering it. “It’s personal.”

“So is mine,” Chloe says.

They walk quietly for a couple hundred yards, hands still laced together before Beca sighs audibly and pulls Chloe to stop. “There was a guy,” Beca starts.

Chloe’s eyes widen. “If you got it for an ex-boyfriend, I-”

Beca shakes her head. “No. No, I mean, I worked for a guy. At a record shop. He gave me a job sorting CDs and showed me how good things could sound when you mixed them together the right way.” Beca sighs again and Chloe squeezes her hand. “Anyway, he died. Home invasion. He was a big guy, but… Well, he used to call me grasshopper. It seemed right.”

She starts walking again and Chloe falls into step next to her, swinging their hands lightly, their forearms brushing back and forth.

“My grandmother,” Chloe says. Beca looks at Chloe out of the corner of her eye. “She taught me how to sing and how to play the piano. She called me ladybug, because my hair was red and I was her good luck charm. She died when I was in high school. I didn’t take it well.”

Beca squeezes Chloe’s hand, to let her know she’s here. She’s listening and she’s here and she’s kind of falling in love with Chloe and she wants to know these things about Chloe. About how she used to run around in cut-off blue jeans and her brother’s t-shirts and how her grandmother used to call her “Ladybug” and how she cried for two weeks straight after the funeral.

That’s the thing about Chloe. Whenever Beca thinks she knows who Chloe is under all that charm and smile, she turns out to be someone completely different. It’s fun, finding all the different layers to her, peeling off another piece of clothing and finding another piece of ink in its place. 

*

She gets what is probably her last tattoo, for a while, because Chloe asks her to.

They make a trip back to Beca’s mom’s house.

(And God, she’s not sure her mom will ever let her leave. That, or she’ll tell Chloe to stay, since they seem to get along so well it creeps Beca out.)

Beca shows Chloe all the places she loved to hang out before. They stop at Rex’s Records, which is now a bakery, and they even get a donut to split. They go see Ethan and he spends all of the ten minutes hitting on Chloe, which is just about as long as it takes Beca to get over her shock and threaten to tattoo “bitch” on his forehead.

He laughs at their design. “You really want this? Both of you?”

Beca rolls her eyes. “Ethan, just do it. What am I even paying you for?”

Ethan leers from behind his glasses. “My charming personality.”

Chloe laughs and Ethan gets gooey-eyed, practically tripping over himself to clear a space on the table for her, so she can lay her arm out for him. Beca sits back and watches, mostly amused, as Chloe chats Ethan up, their words barely audible over the low hum of the machine. Chloe’s free hand is laced in hers, her fingers tapping rhythmically against the back of Beca’s hand.

She doesn’t let go of Chloe’s hand, even when they switch seats and Beca is the one at the table.

When Ethan is done, he sits back and nods, completely self-assured.

“Three songs on one body,” Beca notes. “It’s like a game of which one is not like the other.”

Chloe bumps her shoulder into Beca’s, holding her freshly-inked arm between her hands. “Musical notes look good on you.”

Beca turns her head to the side, singing the words she knows belong to the notes. “I’m bulletproof, nothing to lose…”

“Fire away, fire away,” Chloe finishes, reading her own tattoo’s instruction.

Later that night, she takes a mental calculation of all of Chloe’s tattoos and then follows it up with a physical exploration, taking the time to memorize each one of them.

The longer she looks, the more she thinks that maybe tattoos do fit Chloe after all.


End file.
